Original draft: August 1, 2016
Summer is usually a time for healing.
I’m not saying I have a ton of experience with the traditional definition of “exes” because in the traditional definition of “date for a long time, fall in love, fall out of love, break up,” I have two, both of which started in college. I have a lot of experience with other kinds of exes though. There’s the Banker, who only met me in bars after 10pm to act like my boyfriend until the next morning, and there’s the Nice Guy that I went on four dates with and never once kissed because he bored me. There’s the Boss, who only liked me when he couldn’t have me and insulted my intelligence once I finally gave in, and of course there’s the Child, the story we don’t need to rehash again. Those stories are all finished and gratefully so, but there are always little chances to run into people in a city like New York. Especially when there’s a Fling from a few years back that’s related to a core member of the group, and you start a new job that is quite literally around the corner from an ex’s office. You know. Those typical situations.
Truth be told, more than anything those last bits are funny coincidences over anything substantial in my life. And I didn’t think that I needed to be contemplating all these past parts of me, not now, when there are so many exciting things coming up in the next few weeks. Maybe I still don’t, who knows.
Before I left for Argentina back in 2008, my grandmother, the adorable woman she is, gave me a red notebook, a simple thing with white dots and flowers. She told me she’d noticed how much I loved writing, and thought it would be a good way to capture my experience living in a foreign country for that time, something to look back on in however many years to relive the feeling of the first day, the first month, the little memories that fade with time. I was really diligent about writing in it for the first few weeks, eventually stopping in favor of nights at the bar instead of nights with a notebook, but ever since that day, that notebook has never left my possession. It’s something I’ve been writing in for over six years now, intermittent bursts of inspiration coming like slow waves of emotion. I have sporadic entries in clusters, writing near daily for a month in 2011, then not again till 2012, then not again till early 2014. In my many moves around the city, I’ve debated whether I should get rid of it, but there are so many intimate pieces of me in those pages, pieces of so many different LBs in the past seven years, it’s like a part of me at this point, that little red notebook I never thought I’d fill.
Chronicle of a 20-whatever 
